


Cold Man

by thatsrightdollface



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Library, Alternate Universe - Non-Despair (Dangan Ronpa), Gen, Happy Halloween!!, M/M, Serial Killer, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-13 23:30:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16481822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Shuichi Saihara met the cold man in the very back of the library basement, where all the dusty things nobody usually looked for waited.  He was bent over, at first, and rifling through a mildew-sticky box of old newspapers.  His hair was long and silky, falling over one of his shoulders and blocking his face.





	Cold Man

**Author's Note:**

> :D Thank you for reading this, and I hope you have a great day/really fun Halloween!!

Shuichi Saihara met the cold man in the very back of the library basement, where all the dusty things nobody usually looked for waited.  He was bent over, at first, and rifling through a mildew-sticky box of old newspapers.  His hair was long and silky, falling over one of his shoulders and blocking his face.

Shuichi jumped a little when he saw the cold man, even before he got a good look at the zippered mask over his mouth, or the tangle of bandages and talismans wound up his arms and between each of his fingers.  He hadn’t been expecting to see anyone down here at closing time, with the world already so dark and half-frozen outside.  Shuichi and his coworker Kokichi Oma had just been closing up.  Kokichi thought it was pretty funny how Shuichi insisted on checking all the windows every night they had him on this shift – _“Even the ones that haven’t been opened since the Stone Age?  Aw, you do you, Mr. Detective Wannabe!”_ – but it was probably good they’d found the cold man now, before anybody tried setting the door alarm.

The air around the cold man was chill and sour – it made Shuichi think of crawling around underground.  Breathing in the dirt.  Shuichi cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me, sir.  The library is closing now.”

That was when the cold man turned to smile at him.  The zipper over his mouth twitched, and his eyes seemed like moss grown without any taste of the sun.

“Oh?  Oh yes…” the cold man whispered.  His voice was sing-song, though not at all in the same way Kokichi made his own voice when he felt like teasing.  “I wonder – do you know of any books about that rotten killer Korekiyo Shinguji?  I can’t seem to find him anywhere at all.”

“Is this for a project?” Shuichi asked slowly.  Quietly.  He had a hard time letting people down, sometimes.  Kokichi said it was because he was the sort of person who apologized to furniture he bumped into and secretly wanted everyone he met to like him.  Even cold, cold men asking about long dead serial killers in the moldiest part of the library after closing time.

Shuichi would be going to Kokichi’s Halloween party after this, actually.  They were going as Batman and the Joker, this year, and Kokichi had convinced a girl he knew – Miu something – to make him candy-sweet green and purple smoke bombs.  Thinking about all that felt so far away for a second, though.  Everything – Kokichi’s loud, cackling friends…  The way he’d flushed red under his clown paint, when they had tested out the costumes and Shuichi'd threatened to arrest him in his very best Batman voice.  Shuichi had only just realized recently that this, _this_ was Kokichi’s particular brand of flirting.  The games they played.  But…

But all that seemed to belong to another, different day, when the cold man stood and hummed a little under his breath.  “It’s for a gift,” he said.  “I’m afraid I keep forgetting what it was that went so wrong.”

The vines outside the library window were dusty and dead, knotted like old rope.  Shuichi checked the window lock like he had come downstairs to do, and said, “I can order you in a book, if we don’t have one here.  Korekiyo Shinguji died so long ago – he has plenty of biographies.  And a couple horror movies, I think.”  Those biographies were mostly descriptions of mangled girls and ghost stories, but Shuichi didn’t say that part.

“No need to go through that trouble,” the cold man said.  He was looking at Shuichi so sadly, now.  Almost too fondly.  “All will be well if you can tell me why Korekiyo Shinguji killed.  I remember it was meant for love, but, ah…”

Shuichi remembered descriptions of Korekiyo Shinguji’s victims – splattered skulls and crooked, prayerfully broken fingers…  Blood mixed with ritual salt and incense.  The idea of connecting any of that to the word “love” spoken _just so earnestly_ made Shuichi shudder like he’d stepped out into the snow.

“Please,” the cold man said, and there was a frenzied wanting in his expression that Shuichi didn’t like at all, even while he thought _“What a broken creature,”_ in a voice that almost wasn’t his own.

“We going or what?” Kokichi Oma called from upstairs.  He would be wearing his jaunty Joker-ish suit jacket, by now, and eating candy that had been meant for their library patrons.

Shuichi glanced from the stairs to the cold man and back again.  He thought through a little of what he _could_ have said about Korekiyo Shinguji.  He knew the stories, of course.  Too many people acted like they had happened on another earth, to strangers that had never truly lived.

Shuichi decided not to tell the cold man any of those stories, though.  He said, “I can’t remember.  Sorry.  I could look it up for you a different day, sir.”

“Thank you,” the cold man said.  “I guess what _I_ remember will have to be enough.”  He ran a hand through his long, smooth hair and chuckled, almost tenderly, behind his mask.  “Enjoy your night.  I’m sorry to keep you, really.”

For a moment, Shuichi wondered if he had gotten the cold man wrong.  He sounded so kind, at the end, and his voice shook like he was embarrassed.  It wasn’t a librarian’s place to judge anyone looking for knowledge.  That had been in the training videos and everything.

Shuichi was thinking maybe he’d been a little quick to judge the situation – _“Doubting his Dark Knight instincts,”_ Kokichi might’ve said – as the two of them let the cold man out into the parking lot and locked the door.  And then they went to their party; they almost kissed, at one point, but Shuichi’s mask got somewhat in the way.

By the next morning, a woman may have been found dead in a misty park, with the air all around tasting wrong.  Like crawling through dirt.  The words “For Love” would be carved across her skin in gory, dripping calligraphy.

Maybe.  Or they might not have found her, yet.


End file.
